WordPress SEO, AI and GEO: the settings to get cited by ChatGPT

WordPress SEO covers the settings and content that help search engines find, understand and rank a WordPress website: readable URLs, titles, sitemap, speed, SEO plugin. These foundations also serve AI platforms, which rely largely on indexed pages.

GEO adds four points: letting AI crawlers through, writing direct answers, describing the business with complete structured data and getting cited on other websites.

WordPress has real strengths here. Most themes show the text directly in the page's code, where every crawler can read it. WordPress has created a sitemap on its own since version 5.5. And SEO plugins cover most of the settings.

The audit recognises WordPress, your theme and your plugins, for example “WordPress · Astra theme · Yoast SEO plugin”, then checks:

• the indexing of your pages in Google and Bing;
• AI crawlers' access to your website;
• the structured data for your business, your services and your FAQs;
• whether your content can be read without JavaScript;
• direct answers, FAQs, page freshness and authors;
• the llms.txt file, which carries little weight in the score;
• language versions, if your website has several.

Each recommendation then tells you which menu to open in your WordPress and, if needed, the code to paste.

In Settings, then Reading, the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box must be unticked. Ticked while the website was being built, it's often forgotten. It then asks search engines not to index your pages: Google stops showing them, both in its results and in its AI Overviews. Also check, in the Search Console settings, that the generative AI setting doesn't exclude your website.

As long as no file exists on the server, WordPress creates a virtual robots.txt; open yourwebsite.co.uk/robots.txt to see it. To edit it:

• with Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO, Tools, then File editor; this editor only appears if file editing is allowed on your WordPress;
• with Rank Math: Rank Math SEO, General Settings, then Edit robots.txt, an option visible in Advanced Mode; Rank Math only edits the virtual file, and can do nothing if a real robots.txt file already exists on the server.

Delete any “Disallow: /” line placed under “User-agent: *”, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. Also check your security plugin and, where relevant, Cloudflare: some tools block AI crawlers outside robots.txt. The AI crawlers and robots.txt guide gives ready-to-copy files.

Yoast SEO and Rank Math already produce basic schema.org markup: the website, the pages, the posts and your organisation. The information still has to be filled in:

• with Yoast SEO: Settings, then Site representation: Organization name, Organization logo, Other profiles;
• with Rank Math: Titles & Meta, then Local SEO: name, logo, address, opening hours.

For a local business, add LocalBusiness data: address, service area, opening hours. Rank Math offers it in its Local SEO module; with Yoast, you need Local SEO, included in Yoast's paid plans, or JSON-LD code pasted with the WPCode plugin. Check the result with Google's Rich Results Test.

One page per service and per area, an answer in the very first sentence, precise facts, an FAQ. In the block editor, both Yoast SEO's FAQ block and Rank Math's automatically add FAQPage markup.

Beware of content that only displays with JavaScript: tabs, sliders or modules from some page builders. If the text doesn't appear in the page's source code, some AI platforms don't read it.

• with Yoast SEO: Settings, Site features, then AI tools, and turn on llms.txt;
• with Rank Math: turn on the LLMS Txt module in the Rank Math dashboard, then configure it in General Settings.

It takes five minutes. Its effect on AI answers hasn't been demonstrated: only do it after the four previous settings.

Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console, then in Bing Webmaster Tools, which can import your websites from Search Console. With Yoast SEO or Rank Math, its address is yourwebsite.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml; without a plugin, yourwebsite.co.uk/wp-sitemap.xml.

Yoast SEO and Rank Math do the essentials in their free versions: titles and descriptions, sitemap, basic structured data, robots.txt editing, llms.txt file. SEOPress, less widespread, offers the same functions, but robots.txt editing and the llms.txt file are reserved for its paid version.

The best one is often the one already installed: completing its settings brings more than switching. Never activate two at once: their titles and structured data would contradict each other. To add code without touching your theme, the WPCode plugin is enough.

iasyo has no commercial relationship with these plugins.

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